1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to storage systems, and more particularly, to procedures and devices for archiving data.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the capacity of data storage systems grows, user practices and behaviors change as well. In particular, the practice of periodically reviewing old files and folders may take on less and less importance as the cost of storage declines. For example, a 1 megabyte (MB) file once was considered a large item by many users. If such a file were no longer needed, a user might delete that file so that storage space would not remain locked up, dedicated to an unnecessary file. As storage has become cheaper, however, the amount of effort that a user may spend on purging unneeded files and data has declined. Indeed, many users may not feel the need to periodically review their files and other data. As a result, information systems may suffer from the presence of large amounts of unneeded data occupying storage space on the disk drives of file servers and other storage systems.
Archive servers may be used to store low-priority information, thus removing the burden of storing such information from servers that carry out production operations in a data-processing environment. An archive program can remove such information from a production server to an archive server. However, the interaction between the archive program and the production server can be costly in terms of the load it places on production server. Thus it would be useful to employ tools and techniques that may reduce the added load on a production server for archiving operations.